Publish each product update as a dated entry that says what changed, who it affects, whether anyone has to act, and where the current documentation lives. Then update every lasting page the change touches, so a buyer never has to piece together today's product from a year of release posts. When a feature is retired, mark the old entry rather than deleting it.
Software companies ship often, and most publish their changes somewhere: a changelog, a release notes page, a monthly roundup post. The trouble starts when that record is the only place a change shows up. The feature page still describes last year's behavior, the help article shows an old screen, and a buyer comparing tools gets two answers from the same company.
This is a content-planning question for software owners and marketing leads, not legal advice. For the wider page set, see our guide to content for software companies.
Separate the record from the current state
Two kinds of page are in play, and they do different work. A changelog is a history, while a feature page is a statement about the product as it stands today. The changelog can say that bulk editing arrived in March and gained undo in June. The feature page should simply describe bulk editing with undo, and link to the changelog for anyone who wants the sequence.
When teams blur the two, one of two things happens. Either the feature page never gets updated because the change "is in the release notes," or the release post becomes the page people land on for questions it answers only partly. Keeping the roles distinct is mostly a matter of habit: every release entry that changes buyer-visible behavior should end with a list of the lasting pages it affects.
What each entry should contain
A useful entry can be read alone, months later, by someone who was not in the release meeting.
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Date released | Lets a reader place the change against what they saw before |
| What changed, in one plain sentence | The part an assistant or a skimming buyer is most likely to quote |
| Who it affects | Plans, roles, regions, or platforms (web, mobile, API) |
| Action required | "None," or exactly what an admin needs to do and by when |
| Status | Beta, generally available, or retired |
| Link to current docs | Sends the reader to the page that will stay accurate |
Monthly roundup posts still help customers who want a digest, but they should link to the individual entries rather than replace them. Our working hypothesis is that a buyer looking up one feature, in a search engine or an assistant, is better served by an entry about that feature than by a long post where it appears as the ninth item.
Skip the internal codename and the list of ticket numbers. Neither tells a customer anything, and both make the one useful sentence harder to find. The fields themselves should be filled by the people who built the change. Nobody in marketing should have to invent who is affected or whether admins must act, because the product manager already settled both questions in the release plan.
Dates that mean something
Dates do real work on software pages, because the reader's first question is often whether a description is current. Google's byline date documentation recommends showing a visible date in a prominent spot, labeling it with words such as "Last updated," and, for structured data, filling in the datePublished and/or dateModified fields. On a release entry, the published date is the release date. On a feature page, the updated date tells a buyer how recently someone confirmed the description.
The update date should mean the content changed. Google's guidance on people-first content raises this directly: among its signs of search engine-first content, it asks whether site owners change page dates to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed. A feature page marked as updated this month should reflect something that happened this month. If a quarterly review found nothing to change, record the review internally rather than moving the public date.
A fictional example: one release, four pages touched
Here is a hypothetical release for a fictional employee onboarding platform. It describes no real product.
The release adds automatic account provisioning through the customer's identity provider, available on the two higher plans. The changelog entry reads: released on a stated date, new hires can now be created automatically from your identity provider, affects admins on the two higher plans, no action required unless you want to turn it on, setup guide linked. Then come the lasting pages. The single sign-on integration page needs a new section. The security overview gains a line about provisioning. The pricing page's plan comparison gets a new row. And the implementation page loses a manual step it used to describe.
Finding those four pages is the job most teams skip. Before an entry is published, someone should ask the release owner: "Which pages on our site describe the behavior this release changed?" The release owner can usually answer in a few minutes, and the list goes into the release record so each page gets an owner and a date.
Retire features without erasing them
When a feature is retired, keep its changelog entries and add a dated note pointing to what replaced it. Update or redirect the old feature page so a buyer who finds it does not evaluate the product on something it no longer does. If the replacement works differently, say how in one sentence, so existing customers know what they need to relearn. Leave the history visible; existing customers use it to understand why their workflow changed, and support uses it to answer them. Our page on how documentation and marketing content work together covers how the help center follows the same change.
A regular review keeps the lasting pages honest between releases. Put the feature pages with the most buyer traffic on a fixed schedule, and check each against the changelog since its last review date.
In Hudson South's process, the Authority Asset gathers your release notes, docs, and approved product facts so each page starts from what actually shipped. Hudson Twenty-One records how your company communicates across 21 dimensions, so release entries and feature pages read in one voice. Market Intelligence researches which product questions buyers ask, which shows which changes deserve more than a changelog line. AEO Creation turns those inputs into answer-first pages that describe the product as it stands.
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- Influence Your Byline Dates in Google Search. Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-16.
- Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content. Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-16.